Are the backlinks months out of date?

Anyone else still seeing this?

[Bobby_Davro]

I know that Google reverted to an old set of backlinks quite some time ago, but these still appear to be in place. I had assumed that this was an emergency measure after a failed crawl. By my reckoning the current backlinks are at least three months old. I may be wrong on that, but it certainly seems that way.

I still have links recorded that were removed a long time ago, and other new ones that have been waiting for an age to be factored in.

Interestingly, Googlebot has spidered all the offending link pages several times, and the cached versions of the pages show the new links and the absence of old ones.

Should we be worried about the increasing disparity between the very fresh Google results and the very out of date Backlinks/PageRank? Does this impact upon the quality of the SERPs?

[EarWig]

Thanks Jim - very grateful for the info.

That might help explain reasons for some of them.

However the trouble of course is that, as we can`t tell what the PR most of these links have as the toolbar is in effect "unreliable" we cannot determine if the links are listed or not.

Catch 22 I believe?
:-)

EW

[super_seo]

jdMorgan,

I've often heard that myth about links with PR 3 of less dont show up in the link request. That's just plain wrong. Has Google just plain stopped showing all new links, possibly but unlikely. Is Google devaluating link power in there algorithm?, most likely. Does Google still use links in there algorithym?, most definately. Has Google factored in the last couple of months link data, absolutley not.

[johnser]

super_seo; "Is Google devaluating link power in there algorithm?, most likely"

That can't be right can it? Link power is the core of the Google algo - or at least the 'old' algo.

Taking a step back from the goldfish bowl of seo discussions, this is surely the most bullet-proof way to still rank sites - the vast majority of which have never been touched by an seo.

[onedumbear]

hey there,
as for how old those back links are, they can't be any older than a month and a half because one of my sites that is still listed is only that old. Hope that helps....

[super_seo]

onedumbear,

Are you saying that you have a site that is showing links using "link:www.mydomain.com" that were placed after june 1st? I would love to hear a confirmation on that. Just did the tally and i've added a total of 18,450 links to may sites since June 1st and have had 0 added to the SERPs results when requesting "link:www.mydomain.com". Thats on over 200 sites averaging over 100 new links a site. 99% of links recieved after May 15th are also not in the results. These are all very different sites many on different hosts and all with different IPs. And all with diferent products and content. I have noticed silght changes however very very slight, and i believe these changes are do to the constant everflux which seems to have settled down the past week or so. Not to the factoring of any of these links I have added.

[Smiley]

GG said:

Remember that we don't show all links, so we can often process newer links without them necessarily showing up for a link: search.

Here lies the key, link: is no longer such fun. Debate about timing and dates of addition of new links is of little relevance as we can't see all the links anyway.

[super_seo]

Smiley,
I dont argue for a second Google that shows all the links from a site. They never have, and I am sure they never will. But many of my old liks are in the index however none of the past 2 months are in. Not showing all and not showing any is a big difference.

[Smiley]

super_seo,

>>Not showing all and not showing any is a big difference.

But if your links are there then I don't think it matters if they show. In a month or so I would imagine you will see some back links showing. There are no hard and fast rules at the moment (and hopefully there never will be)

Smiley

[Krapulator]

18,450 new links to your site in less than two months?

Whats your secret

[super_seo]

10 dedicated full time staff to web promotion and link aquiring running 24 hours per day.

No secret just hard work.

[djgreg]

Maybe there is something like link spamming?

Why the hell do you need so much backlinks? I am ranking well on all my search terms with about 300 backlinks.
Can't see the necessarity of receiving so many backlinks.

[Craig_F]

seems like my situation is different than others here. I have over 1100 very solid, very old links. Most are PR4 or higher. With the recent update mess G only shows 39 backlinks and my PR has dropped by 1.

I've been assuming that since many links are old and on pages that haven't changed they've been missed by the new fresh/deep bot....I do see the pages in the index though.

I'm at a loss otherwise since these are solid links from mostly .edu, .gov, and .org sites. What do you all think?

[grifter]

10 dedicated full time staff to web promotion and link aquiring running 24 hours per day.

Erm, do you really have a graveyard shift? Why? Is it an office space issue? Fascinating.

<edit>grammarfix</edit>

[super_seo]

Djgreg,

First of all my compan is in very highly competitive businesses, and second of all most of my sites dont have more than 4-5 hundred incoming links.

Craig,

many of my old previous links are missing from the index as well. They too were quite solid links.

grifter,

My companies are based in many places in the world and many of my staff are working in other time zones, we do however have a few people that are working night shifts, this is also due the fact we deal internationally with customers, technology staff, and business partners from all over the world. Most of our sites are available in many languages and this allows us to exchanges sites from all over the world in many different languages.

However back to the point can we get some evidence of Googles latest index showing backlinks created prior to June 1st. Or at least some evidence that these recent links are affecting SERPs to date.

[farside847]

GoogleGuy: I think almost all links should be pretty recent now.

GG: I too have very old backlink data. I have confirmed multiple PR7 and PR8 site links that are not listed. The data in google is 3 months old as best as I can tell. Feel free to sticky me if you would like the specific URLs.

[claus]

Craig_F
>> I have over 1100 very solid, very old links. (...) With the recent update mess G only shows 39 backlinks

I'm with you. Got around 1K incoming for one very established site. During my most recent link hunt (today), some were missing, but at least i found a reference to a link in a book, which is nice, albeit not very SE-friendly ;)

I also found these differences in query results:

Q1: "sitename" - 713 off-site inbound links (from about 850 results)
Q2: "link: sitename" - 205 results
Q3: "link: sitename.tld" - 96 results
Q4: "link: www.sitename.tld" - 43 results
Q5: "allinanchor: sitename" - 29 results
Q6: "allinanchor: sitename.tld" - 16 results
Q7: "allinanchor: www.sitename.tld" - 7 results

The "sitename" in question is a special one. It is not a generic term like "widgets" and the word does not have funny meanings in other languages (not any meanings actually). The 850 results from Query 1 are all about the right site.

super_seo
>> back to the point can we get some evidence of Googles latest index showing backlinks created prior to June 1st.

You mean "after" i guess?
Today i found a page updated on June 11 2003 (editors date-stamp) with a backlink to me. This link was a "link of the moment", it's only in the G cache, and it is not on the page today. I also found a backlink on another site which the owner placed on June 18 2003 according to an email he sent me.

/claus

<edit>above, "sitename" is equal to "domain name"</edit>

[SEOPTI]

Seems like managing backlinks for 3,083,324,652 web pages is a big problem and not easy at all.

[steveb]

Are people here really complaining that links made after June 1st aren't showing?

What's up with that? These links came out about June 15th. Given previous update structures that would mean those links are primarily from three weeks earlier.

What Google will do next is anybody's guess, but expecting to see post-June 1st links is plain bizarre, until we see the standard change in Yahoo backlinks.

(There are some June 1 to June 10 links out there but the whole deepfreshcrawl concept means that some sites will show later links but many won't.)

[farside847]

Are people here really complaining that links made after June 1st aren't showing?

No, I am complaining about missing links from pre-April.

[super_seo]

Links are in general over 3 months old. And even those SERPs are missing major high PR solid links in the returning results. I am aware Google does not show all links but it seems to be missing hundreds and hundreds of links that even predate April. The real question is whether Google has stopped showing links all together and is factoring them in somewhere in the background or is taking its time before launching a major change to its index.

[Wired Suzanne]

Googleguy says: "I think almost all links should be pretty recent now."

Well, not mine.
Finally a link to my site with a high PR is indexed! Just too bad that they are not linking to my site anymore.....

They have changed their policy:
>>The page with the link to us should have at least a pagerank of 3.
>>The page with the link to use should have no more than 50 links to external websites.

Anyway, that is another thread...
Just wanted to say to Googleguy that my backlinks aren't updated for a long time.
I am not one of 'almost all'.

[Watcher of the Skies]

SUPER_SEO said:

"[we have]...10 dedicated full time staff to web promotion and link aquiring running 24 hours per day."

Too bad it's come down to this. I don't think this was Google's original intention, but it's certainly what they've created. Perhaps they're working to minimize this a bit - we can only hope.

[Dave_Hawley]

Ours too are months out of date and missing at least 100. I use to have a PR of 6, now after attracting about 100+ more links pointing to me, as well as another 20+ internal content pages, we have a PR of 5 :o(

Is there any official response on the links issue?

Dave

[Krapulator]

If GoogleGuy says that they're up to date (more or less) - theres no reason not to take his word for it. Just because you can't see them using "link:" doesn't mean that have not been counted and taken into account. I image we'll see them reflected in the "link" results after another update.

[jcoronella]

Googleguy says: "I think almost all links should be pretty recent now."

Perhaps he meant "as recent as they are going to be". It makes sense for google to take this tool away from SEO's. It really serves no other useful purpose.

[grifter]

And why wouldn't Google want to get rid of all the non-monetizeable obsessive link: queries the and ship them off to alltheweb? I would. Would save bandwidth $.

[super_seo]

Sorry GG, I should have never doubted you, as of 15th and most notably the past 2 days of this month our listings are soaring towards the top of the search listings, I am now certain many(not ALL) of our links are now being factored in to the current search results. I guess this would mean we will see a total end to any monthly updates and stop to Googles reporting of backlinks. Most likely this will also be the end of any real true PR toolbar reporting. Interesting turn.

[johnser]

Got a link for a site thats 4 months old last week with very few other links. The latest link went live on Sunday 20th July & is on hundreds of PR5/6 pages on the site whose home page=PR8.

Am checking daily for change in our v. competitive SERPs.

I think whatever happens in my own case might be a good clue as to whats going across the board. Will post here as soon as theres any news.
J

[jojojo]

"Just because you can't see them using "link:" doesn't mean that have not been counted and taken into account"

Yes it does. I have a site that has had 40+ pr4-5 sites added to it's recips. It has not moved at all yet. It should be at least top 30 for its kw and it is not in top 500.

Don't kid yourselves, there is no rolling update yet.
New links are not being taken into account on the fly yet.
There will be another traditional update coming soon.

[super_seo]

True I am not seeing the dramatic results I expected, but they are moving northward. And I do see some site serps that have no way of being there without inclusion of aquired links from the past month(actually June28th-July 8th). It may be do to algo alterations but my sites seem to be the only ones with any true movement.